12.11. 2016 Daily Mail
Leonard Cohen was a poet, a singer, a novelist, a gypsy, a Jewish Zen-Buddhist and an unashamed ladies’ man. And what a ladies’ man! When the news of his death in Los Angeles was announced yesterday by his son, Adam, a little piece of romance went out of the world.
At eighty two he had been working right up to the end, in the knowledge that he probably didn’t have long left. In July this year on hearing that his onetime lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen, was close to death he wrote her a farewell letter saying that he thought he would be following her soon.
‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he wrote. ‘Endless love. See you down the road’ – words that might have been written about him by any one of his multitude of fans today. Because to many, his songs were so intimate, he seemed like an old friend.
To those who perhaps misunderstood him, the world-weary, melancholic, deep tone of his voice, made him the ‘godfather of gloom’. But, although he struggled with depression all his life, that was a wrong impression.
Because behind that image of sad introspection, was a naturally funny, self-deprecating man, as I immediately discovered when we met before he was famous, right back in 1968.
He had just made his first album and had turned up in London with, he said, ‘what I stand up in’. He was already thirty three, which seemed to me to be a bit old for getting into the music world, and he didn’t look like anything other than a university lecturer. But he was totally unlike anyone else making records then.
He was born in Montreal to a family which owned a successful clothing store, and who, he jokily told me, ‘built, and were pillars of, synagogues. We weren’t lavish but we must have been quite well off, and I grew up like the Queen believing that it was unnecessary to concern myself with the making of money.’
This led him to the literary life, first in Canada and then to New York’s Columbia University, where he was finally asked to leave when he wrote a dissertation on his own first published book of poetry. He chose it, he joked, ‘because it was the only book I’d read’.
But why did he want to write poetry, I’d wanted to know.
His answer was telling. Because, he said, it was part of the courting process. ‘I must have looked extremely absurd because I wrote all my poems to ladies thinking that was the way to approach them.
‘So, I was suddenly taken seriously as a poet, when really I was a kind of stud – and not a very successful one, because the successful ones didn’t have to write poems to make girls.’
He was, he smiled, ‘a romantic and a lecher and a lover of women’. Women, he insisted, were in control. ‘Everything a man does is laid out at a woman’s feet whether it is a battle or a song, or an amalgamation between two great companies. At some time in the day the man comes home to his woman and says, “Look what I’ve done”.’
He had few material needs, and in his twenties he lived as a bohemian on a modest stipend from his family, and then another from the Canada Council of Arts. At first it was in London, until the weather got to him, when he took off for the Greek island of Hydra, where, a small inheritance from his grandmother, allowed him to buy a tiny white-washed cottage in the early Sixties.
It was there that he met the now almost mythical (among Cohen cognoscenti) Marianne, whom he was to immortalise in song. She was he told me, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
‘She had a three month old child, and her husband had just fallen in love with an American girl. So I went to him and said if he went off with the other girl, I would like to go and live with Marianne. We had a lot of drinks together and talked about it and everything worked out all right.’
Marianne, however, soon had to accept her new lover’s need for other women. She would later say it drove her to threaten suicide, but that wasn’t how Cohen saw it.
‘She knows that is what my nature is,’ he told me, ‘and I say to her, “what are your appetites?” She knows what I mean, because she is attracted to other men.’
She was certainly beautiful, as can be seen in the photograph of her clothed only in a white towel on the back cover of Cohen’s second album. Although their relationship didn’t last, their friendship did.
But then as the world awoke to this strange poet-singer, who fused eroticism with Old Testament imagery, soul searching and wry verbal jokes, there would be many more women to fall in love with. Poetry was an aphrodisiac. He’d been right all along.
Some women were famous, like Joni Mitchell, who would later describe him as ‘a boudoir poet’, others were surprising choices, such as his assignation with Janis Joplin in the Chelsea Hotel in Greenwich Village, a moment that he put into song, too.
And then there were the long standing affairs, such as the ten years he spent with his common law wife Suzanne Elrod, the mother of his two children, and later with actress Rebecca de Mornay. That eventually foundered because, she said, Cohen, just ‘couldn’t do relationships’. He never married.
He couldn’t cope with drink either. Never a stranger to drugs, which may or may not have helped him write, alcohol helped get him on stage and get over his nerves at performing in public.
It wasn’t good for him, though, and only increased his depression. In the Eighties his records were no longer selling, and so in 1993 he entered a Zen Buddhist monastery in Los Angeles, He stayed there for five years. Always fascinated by religion, and he knew a lot about Catholicism and Hinduism, to Cohen, Buddism wasn’t a faith so much as a discipline.
He enjoyed the experience, living in a hut, not worrying about worldly goods. He even became a Buddhist monk. Unfortunately, while he was doing that, his business manager, a lady called Kelley Lynch, was very worldly, making off with five million dollars of his savings.
Re-entering the world of the less spiritual he sued her and won the case, without, at the time of his death, having got his money back.
With a family to support, he had no alternative but to go back to work, touring and making records in his seventies, even appearing at Glastonbury in 2008. The fans found he could still do it.
At which point he had the most amazing turn of fortune. A song he’d spent five years writing, and then seen his 1975 recording of it not even released in America, had, all the time he’d been in the monastery, been gathering attention.
It was Hallelujah, a puzzling mingling of sex and the Bible, and his friend Bob Dylan had been one of the first to realise its potential. In the mid-nineties Jeff Buckley recorded it, and then Alexandra Burke made it the biggest British hit of 2008 when she sang it to win the X-Factor television show. There are now 200 versions of it on sale, making it by far Cohen’s most successful ever song.
With his heritage secured, but his body failing, he gave up touring, concentrating as he always had done on writing. His most recent album, You Want It Darker, being released to much admiration just three weeks ago.
The end of his life was lived in a quiet, bookish domesticity, in an apartment in a two story house in an unglamorous part of Los Angeles, with his daughter and her children, living below, and his producer son not very far away.
He was, he said recently, a tidy man, and he wanted to tidy everything up before he died. But, no doubt, there will be hundreds of poems and lyrics unfinished, because he never stopped writing.
In many ways he was also an unusual, singular man, with his fascination with religion, and his dedication to the job of the writer. There were, he said, about eighty verses to Hallelujah, only a fraction of which made it on to the final finished version of the record. It was, he thought, a good song, ‘but too many people sing it’.
Yesterday Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paid homage to Cohen and his songs, ‘the perennial favourites of so many generations’.
But to the fans, who regarded Leonard Cohen with a rare reverence, the only words they will want to hear today are those written and sung by the man himself; romantics who, when they were young, Cohen introduced to the mystery of the tantalizing Suzanne, who ‘feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China…’
It was his first hit, but it was also his admission of how successful his young man’s plan to seduce by poetry had finally been. As he confessed in song: ‘For you’ve touched her perfect body with you mind’.
